Wednesday, January 28, 2009

In the physical world that we are familiar with and live in, we understand about the role of molecules and cells, strings of sugars and amino acids, elements and atoms. But at the quantum level, where individual atoms or even parts of atoms can be studied, the natural laws that we adhere to suddenly change.

It has occurred to me that the reason is simple, if not well understood. At different levels of size, things play by a different set of rules.

Imagine if we could observe structural masses that our known universe is actually inside of. What kind of natural rules would play out at that size? What if there is a whole other universe at orders of magnitude smaller than the quantum structures that we can observe or predict?

We know so little about what we can see. Yet we know so much more than when we were skeptical about the existence of atoms themselves.